30 pages • 1 hour read
Sebastian JungerThe Perfect Storm
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Andrea Gail
Six men—Tyne, Pierre, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy, and Shatford—make up the crew of the Andrea Gail, but the key word is crew; once on the ship, they are not individuals. They are linked together by their job, by their proximity, and by their fate. While Junger delves briefly into their backgrounds, he does so not to individualize them, but to provide their reasons for wanting to go to sea. For all but Billy Tyne, it’s money. As captain, Tyne likes the solitude of the sea, but the rest of the crew want only to fish and come home with money in their pockets. They lead hard lives, drinking heavily both before and after leaving for a trip. Bobby Shatford has a black eye from where his girlfriend punched him; he needs money to pay his alimony from his first marriage, and he’s been living above the Crow’s Nest bar, where his mother works. Ethel, his mother, proclaims that swordfishing is a “young man’s game, a single man’s game” (17), and Junger says “By and large, young men from Gloucester find themselves at sea because they’re broke and need money fast” (15). He means that living in Gloucester has introduced them to the dangers of the sea, and only the lure of money entices them to go fishing.
The Andrea Gail itself becomes the central mystery of the book. Junger attempts to recreate her last few weeks, and especially her last few hours and minutes. He attempts to pinpoint where and when and how she went down, so the ship itself becomes a character, a collective symbol of not only the men aboard her, but all men who have been lost at sea in such a storm.
The Satori
The Satori becomes a central character in the book because of her rescue. She hits the storm while traveling from Maine to Bermuda, and the three crew aboard—Ray Leonard, who owns the boat; Karen Stimpson, a seasoned sailor; and Sue Bylander—are battered and beaten. The ship, they believe, is going down, so they put out a distress call. Despite the mayday, all three on board believe they are going to die: Leonard refuses to get out of bed, Bylander tapes her passport to her body so it can be identified, and Stimpson writes goodbye letters.
Junger includes the Satori and its crew for two reasons: the first is to show a rescue operation in action, and how difficult, even for highly-trained professionals, it is to carry one out in such dangerous seas. While the Satori crew tries to survive for twelve hours while the Coast Guard cutter Tamaroa makes it way to them, the seas continue to batter and bruise them. They could sink literally at any time, from one wave. Even when the cutter arrives, rescue is not assured. The first raft over the side is punctured, and the rescue abandoned, leaving the helicopter team to rescue the three crew—and now three crewmen from the cutter—in an open-sea rescue, meaning the Satori crew have to jump in the ocean.
The second, more simple, reason Junger includes the story of the Satori, is to show how the Andrea Gail might have been saved, if she could have been found.
Albert Johnston, Tommy Barrie, Linda Greenlaw
Johnston is captain of the Mary T, Barrie is the captain of the Allison, and Greenlaw is captain of the Hannah Boden. All are ships of similar size as the Andrea Gail. Much of what Junger gathers of the fate of the Gail is from these captains, in the form of interviews, ships’ logs, and speculation. Their background is important in the book as fishermen and captains, men and women who understand the ocean and fishing. They provide much of the details Junger is able to uncover about the Gail. Barrie was the last to talk to Billy Tyne, Johnston’s ship was closest to the Gail, and Greenlaw’s Boden was the Gail’s sister ship, owned by the same man. It is through the three of them that Junger gets much of his information about the demise of the Gail, about what Billy Tyne would have done in the storm, and at what point he would have realized he was in deep, deep trouble.
The Rescue Teams
In trying to find what happened to the Andrea Gail, Junger relates the story of the attempted rescue of the Satori. Due to the dangerous seas, the Air Guard helicopter sent to rescue the crew of the Satori is forced to abandon the helicopter—they have to dive into the ocean—and then are in need of rescue themselves. Their rescue, like the rescue attempt of the Satori, and like the search for the Andrea Gail, becomes a central part of the narrative that shows how easy, even when attempting to rescue others, highly-trained men and women can be overcome by the conditions, and need rescue themselves. The men aboard, from pilot Dave Ruvola to rescue swimmer John Spillane, all know the dangers, but they go out anyway. When they are forced to jump from the helicopter, they assume it’s a death sentence. And it would be, if not for the other rescuers who come for them. The Coast Guard cutter Tamaroa, already involved in the rescue of the Satori, finds them and, putting the ship in great danger, saves all but one of the helicopter crew. In all, the search for Rick Smith involved nine airplanes, and the search for the Andrea Gail involved fifteen. Both searches, and the rescue operations for the Satori, and the Japanese sailboat, involved hundreds of rescuers, from airplane and helicopter pilots to various Coast Guard crew to communications and weather teams on land.
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